I decided one day to try out Aperture 2 and found that it won't run on machines with less than 1 GB of RAM. Tinkering around, I stumbled onto some files that can fix this.

First you need Aperture 2 or the trial version from Apple. Once you have it, you need to drag the Aperture package and packages folder to the Desktop. Right-click the package and choose Show Package Contents. Open Contents and right-click Aperture (trial).dist; choose Open With and then Other. In the window that displays, choose TextEdit (or your favorite text editor) and scroll all the way to the bottom of the window. Now slowly scroll back up untill you see:

Save the file and close it. Double-click the Aperture package on the Desktop and follow the instructions to install the program.

After installation, go to your Applications folder and right-click the Aperture application; choose Show Package Contents. Open the Contents folder and then the Resources folder and find minsys.plist; open this file in your favorite text editor. Search for 1000 and replace it with 256. You'll be changing this part of the file:

Of course this doesn't address the more important question - how do you get reasonable performance out of Aperture on a machine with only 256MB of RAM? Aperture is one of those apps that can be a bit of a dog on machines near the bottom of the "acceptable" systems. Maybe if you just needed it to hold projects on a secondary machine, I could see trying this. But as a reasonable workstation for any kind of real photo management and processing, let's just say I have my doubts...

I can't see this being of any use other than to see what the interface looks like. In actuality, the Aperture team set that minimum requirement for a good reason: Aperture is quite the resource hog and has had a history of performance problems on anything but the fastest and most RAM-equipped machines. Despite owning Aperture, I almost exclusively use Lightroom because I can use it even on a MacBook without issue.

Anyway, it just brings me to my final thought: What, Sir, are you doing running an OS X machine under Tiger (or possibly Leopard) with only 256MB RAM? You must have a load more patience than most of us, and I'm positive your hard drive would be most grateful if you took some of the load off it. RAM is inexpensive these days - try ramjet.com for example.*

I've never installed/used Aperture before. But on another note, I wish Apple -- yes, Apple, not 3rd-party company -- had developed an native uninstall mechanism for users to remove, trial or not, applications.

While certainly not as fast as on a multicore Mac Pro, it was quite peppy and I had no problems using it whatsoever.

If I were a pro photographer, and needed to process a LOT of images, I can see where Aperture would be a VERY useful application, and well worth the expense of buying.

However, as a rank amateur, using a cheap Kodak point and shoot digital camera, Aperture was serious overkill for my needs.

I deleted it after a while, as it really offered nothing that I couldn't do elsewhere with other software I already owned, and was familiar with, and frankly, I needed the hard drive space more than the application.